2014-06-??: We connected the HAM-it-up board to the discone antenna, so it's now receiving HF

+

2014-06-??: R820T dongle connected to the discone antenna got fried, we can see some brownish burn marks inside it

+

2014-??-??: The LNA4ALL amplifying the discone signal broke down :(

2014-02-15: Installed our [http://lna4all.blogspot.nl/ LNA4ALL] amplifier on the discone antenna, should give a slightly better signal-noise ratio and allow us to split the radio signal out to several receivers so we can capture several kinds of signals at once (e.g. ADSB, AIS and APRS).

2014-02-15: Installed our [http://lna4all.blogspot.nl/ LNA4ALL] amplifier on the discone antenna, should give a slightly better signal-noise ratio and allow us to split the radio signal out to several receivers so we can capture several kinds of signals at once (e.g. ADSB, AIS and APRS).

News

2014-06-??: We connected the HAM-it-up board to the discone antenna, so it's now receiving HF
2014-06-??: R820T dongle connected to the discone antenna got fried, we can see some brownish burn marks inside it
2014-??-??: The LNA4ALL amplifying the discone signal broke down :(
2014-02-15: Installed our LNA4ALL amplifier on the discone antenna, should give a slightly better signal-noise ratio and allow us to split the radio signal out to several receivers so we can capture several kinds of signals at once (e.g. ADSB, AIS and APRS).

Introduction

Roof is looking much better now

This project consists of several small sub-projects related to radio reception at RevSpace.
Reception is based (so far) on DVB-T dongles using an RTL2832 chip to do SDR (software-defined-radio).

Hardware

HF and below (0 - 30 MHz)

To receive signals from the relatively low frequency "HF" band, we have a ham-it-up board.
The ham-it-up converts signals from 0-30 MHz up to 125-155 MHz, this makes is possible to use an RTL2832-based dongle to receive them. Right now we are experimenting with receiving HF on the discone: pskreporter makes it easy to plot a map.

Generic VHF/UHF (24 - 1700 MHz)

Still installing

For generic radio reception in the VHF/UHF bands, we have a setup consisting of a discone antenna (ICOM AH-7000) on the roof of RevSpace and an RTL2832 dongle (R820T tuner).
A simple filter (1/4 wave open stub) has been built to suppress very strong P2000-pager signals.

Things that can be received with this setup:

Citizens Band radio, 27 MHz

10 meter amateur band, 28-29.7 MHz

4 meter amateur band, 70-70.5 MHz

broadcast FM stereo, 88-108 MHz;

air traffic (voice and ACARS data);

P2000 paging traffic at 169.650 MHz;

weather images from the NOAA-15/18/19 weather satellites, at around 137 MHz;

HAB tracker (434-435 MHz)

The colinear

For tracking high-altitude balloons, we have a setup consisting of a collinear antenna for 70cm on the roof of RevSpace, a so-called hab-amp (bandpass filter for 430-440 MHz and low noise amplifier) and an RTL2832 dongle (FC0013 tuner).
For more information, see the dedicated page at HAB_Tracker_Station

Remote control

Running projects

AIS decoding

Amateur satellite reception

In this project, we try to receive amateur satellites and process data like telemetry.
There are several amateur satellites in orbit right now, some of which transmit in frequency range of our HAB setup. Signals outside of the 70cm band can only be received with the discone antenna. This antenna might not be the best for picking up weak signals. However, since we have line of sight as soon as it's a few degrees above the horizon it should still produce some interesting results.

We have already managed to receive (but not decode yet) signals from the STRaND-1 and HOPE-1 (HO-68) satellites.

In the future, we plan to receive and decode telemetry from the existing Delfi-C3 and its successor Delfi-n3xt (launched in November 2013).

RevSpace (and nine others) just decoded and reported a packet

Delfi-n3xt has heard, but not yet decoded. Instead we have been focusing on the FUNcube-1 cubesat. As of editing this page (25 hours since launch) we received 113 packets. You can see up-to-date receiver statistics here. The FUNcube warehouse is the central database where radio enthusiasts all over the world can submit their decoded telemetry data to, so the FUNcube team always knows whats going on.